About
Name: Scott Lazarowitz
Website: Reasonandjest.com (URL: http://www.reasonandjest.com/blog)
Age: Over 39
Born and Raised: Connecticut
Location: New England
College: Majored in Psychology
Purpose For Website: To inform and entertain, and convince people that freedom is good and government isn’t, and that a genuinely capitalist system that respects individual rights and private property rights is the only system that coincides with freedom, and that freedom creates prosperity for the greatest proportion of the population while government does nothing but violate individual rights and cause impoverishment of the masses. And with cartoons making fun of the people in power who need to be made fun of (although they need more than that, etc. etc.).
Influences: Parents, Ayn Rand, Gene Burns, Llewellyn Rockwell, David Brudnoy, Jacob Hornberger, Richard Ebeling, Jerry Williams, Ron Paul, Lawrence Reed, Murray Rothbard, Walter Williams, Moe Lauzier, Larry Glick, Sigmund Freud, Carol Burnett, Phyllis Diller, Charles Schulz, Washingtoon (Mark Alan Stamaty), Alan Dershowitz, Leonard Read, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Nat Hentoff, Thomas Szasz, George Will, Alice Miller, Lisa G. from 7th Grade, and others
Writers, educators, theorists, intellectuals, economists, philosophers, etc. recently discovered whose views seem to mirror my own: Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Values: “Traditional” values, “American” values, “Judeo-Christian” values, “Western” values, “Human” values
Admire: Pope John Paul II
Music: Classical.
Personal Issues: Anxiety, need for freedom, anxiety, anxiety, angst
Priorities in Life: Convincing people to choose freedom and reject government, being able to move out of this one-bedroom piece of crap, being able to move out of this dreaded frigid, Siberia New England and to a warmer area!
Would Vote in 2010 and 2012 For: Anyone who promises to dismantle government, not “reform” it!
From My August 4th, 2009 Post:
A lot of my writing here has been in the category of economics, even though I didn’t really study that. Well, that’s not true. While I majored in psychology in college, I did take one economics course, but it was sooooooo boring–I learned nothing in that class. But I studied economics in the sense of really learning about it after college, mostly during the 1980s, by hearing people on the radio and on tapes, and reading various material–mostly libertarian-based periodicals.
Thank God Gene Burns was on WRKO for several years. He was the most pro-free market, pro-private property rights, pro-freedom of association advocate I’ve ever heard on the radio. It was through his show in ‘87 and ‘88 that I heard Ron Paul, and was very fortunate to read some of Dr. Paul’s writings. (I was able to convince at least one person in 1988 to vote for Dr. Paul: one of my former psychology professors, who, after hearing Dr. Paul’s interview on the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, said it was the first time he had someone to vote for, not against, for president. Me, too.)
Also in that period, I had some audio cassette tapes, including a discussion between Ron Paul and economics professor Lawrence Reed, Money and the Federal Reserve, and a lecture by Prof. Reed, Trade Cycles: The Economics of Boom and Bust, and several lectures by philosopher Ayn Rand, mostly at the “Ford Hall Forum.” And some of my reading material at the time included periodicals such as Liberty, which I now see is still in publication and online, Reason magazine, also online, and the Freeman, also now online, which is a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, whose current president is the aforementioned Prof. Reed. Other people who have influenced my thinking include the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Jacob Hornberger, economics professor Walter E. Williams, who gives a common sense approach to economic matters in everyday life, as did the late economist Murray Rothbard.
Also in the 1980s, Llewellyn Rockwell’s articles gave me a more fine-tuned understanding of private property rights. Mr. Rockwell’s website, LewRockwell.com, is probably one of the best sources of discussions on liberty out there. On LewRockwell.com, you can find articles by Ron Paul, finance professor Michael Rozeff, such as this recent one, Irrationality and Fascism in Government-Regulated Health Care, and articles by Donald Miller MD, such as the Austrian Cure for Economic Illness. Given that Dr. Miller’s main field of knowledge and practice has been in medicine for many years, he still knows economics better than probably most Harvard economists. And I say that because free market advocates think and report with reasoned analysis of actual truth of history and current events. In contrast, the economists of the Left, who oppose freedom and free markets, fantasize. Most of the people in the so-called mainstream news business also live in an irrational fantasy world, and that is why they seem to worship President Obama, their Messiah.
Unlike mainstream free market economists and the ones in the media, who deal mostly with the practicality of free markets vs. the impracticality of government-controlled markets, the people mentioned here in the first few paragraphs deal with the practicalities, but also with the morality of free market economics, as did Ayn Rand. It is moral to respect the freedom of people to trade voluntarily, and it is immoral to violate and interfere with people’s private matters and relationships. Yes, it’s that simple.
And the problem with those whose job it is to inform the public, the news reporters and anchors and writers and editors, besides living in their left-wing fantasy world, is now their having become such a propaganda machine for their worshipped politicians. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the left-biased mainstream news media no longer find answers to the who, what, why, when, where and how, because they don’t care to find those answers. Instead, they use their role as “journalists” to be an activist, and support the pro-government, pro-fascism propaganda that manipulates their and the general population’s emotions. Objectivity and truth are now foreign concepts to these people. Michael Graham’s show is called The Natural Truth because he really believes in getting at the truth. In the national news media, I can say Chris Wallace really does try to ask those both left and right politicians tough and necessary questions, because, as good ol’ Jerry Williams would say, getting a straight answer out of them is like a dentist trying to pull a tooth. Chris Wallace’s is the show that should be called Hardball. Most of those news people just let Mr. Obama get away with lying through his teeth. And Don Imus also interviews people on the left and right with more objectivity than most of the mainstream news media do.
Freedom and Truth are important.